Words like “incompetent” and “inept” have often been used by President Donald Trump’s critics to describe his response to the coronavirus pandemic. And while economist Robert Reich, a vehement Trump critic, doesn’t necessarily disagree with those adjectives, he has another term to describe Trump’s coronavirus response: power grab. And in an op-ed for The Guardian, Reich (who served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton the 1990s) lays out why he sees it that way.
“The utter chaos in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic — shortages of equipment to protect hospital workers, dwindling supplies of ventilators and critical medications, jaw-dropping confusion over how $2.2tn of aid in the recent coronavirus law will be distributed — was perhaps predictable in a nation that prides itself on competitive individualism and hates centralized power,” Reich explains. “But it is also tailor-made for Donald Trump, who has spent a lifetime exploiting chaos for personal gain and blaming others for losses.”
Reich goes on to cite some examples of “chaos” during the pandemic — which, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 70,000 people worldwide (as of Monday morning, April 6). Continue reading.